Hmm. I’m getting a bit of what you’re getting at with biology, and you might be right. But sociology doesn’t become less true when it’s harder to study it, and I’m throwing in my chips with the side that is guessing that most of the time genetics matter less than most people think on issues that can also be effected by societal conditioning.
The sex/gender thing was a correction, you were talking about gendered animals, and animals don’t have genders, they just have sexes. Gender is the societal construction, sex is biological. It’s just a definition/clarity issue—sorry to sidetrack with it!
I’d like to point out the falsity that animals do not have gender. Perhaps crickets and pigeons do not have enough complexity within their psychology to either ‘feel like a male’ being a female or ‘behave in stereotipically male ways’ being a female (which I understand as two ways of being cross-gendered. I’m not sure this is how the term “cross-gendered” is used, but it is what I’m meaning here, having sex A and gender B)
But I’ll bet all my money in that a lot of more complex animals (I”ll go with Lions, Bonobos, Dolphins and maybe Baboons) are obviously possibly cross-gendered as a personality trait. That would mean that behaviors usually pertaining to males activate in females (especially triggered ones) with strong stimuli for instance. And some specific animals (say Joe and Mimi) might be so prone to that that actually they behave more like the opposite sex than their own.
Other than that I’m happy with the above clarifying discussion.
I had a bit about how it was possible that some animals had gender but decided that was probably nitpicky detail that overcomplicated the issue, which was that the original response to me was confusing sex and gender. Though it’s also possible that some of the animals that you’re discussing actually are just intersex, or that the entire issue is just us anthromorphizing animals, attributing personality traits to be gendered at all because we’re so entrenched in biological determinism that we’re willing to spew that social baggage on everything we touch.
Hmm. I’m getting a bit of what you’re getting at with biology, and you might be right. But sociology doesn’t become less true when it’s harder to study it, and I’m throwing in my chips with the side that is guessing that most of the time genetics matter less than most people think on issues that can also be effected by societal conditioning.
The sex/gender thing was a correction, you were talking about gendered animals, and animals don’t have genders, they just have sexes. Gender is the societal construction, sex is biological. It’s just a definition/clarity issue—sorry to sidetrack with it!
I’d like to point out the falsity that animals do not have gender. Perhaps crickets and pigeons do not have enough complexity within their psychology to either ‘feel like a male’ being a female or ‘behave in stereotipically male ways’ being a female (which I understand as two ways of being cross-gendered. I’m not sure this is how the term “cross-gendered” is used, but it is what I’m meaning here, having sex A and gender B)
But I’ll bet all my money in that a lot of more complex animals (I”ll go with Lions, Bonobos, Dolphins and maybe Baboons) are obviously possibly cross-gendered as a personality trait. That would mean that behaviors usually pertaining to males activate in females (especially triggered ones) with strong stimuli for instance. And some specific animals (say Joe and Mimi) might be so prone to that that actually they behave more like the opposite sex than their own.
Other than that I’m happy with the above clarifying discussion.
I had a bit about how it was possible that some animals had gender but decided that was probably nitpicky detail that overcomplicated the issue, which was that the original response to me was confusing sex and gender. Though it’s also possible that some of the animals that you’re discussing actually are just intersex, or that the entire issue is just us anthromorphizing animals, attributing personality traits to be gendered at all because we’re so entrenched in biological determinism that we’re willing to spew that social baggage on everything we touch.